(Note: The following article is satire. It is prompted by the recent aggressive stance of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposing any insurance coverage of birth control, even for non-Catholic employees whose employers wish, for their own religious reasons, not to provide it. On the day of this writing [February 12, 2012] a letter from New York City Archbishop and Cardinal Designate Timothy Dolan appeared in the press, blasting President Obama’s proposed compromise on the issue, calling for “religious liberty,” and designating contraception an “immoral practice.”

This cry for religious “freedom” is disingenuous. It is a cry for the freedom to impose one’s religious values on others. The thorny issues inherent in the debate about abortion do not even apply here. No sane person can possibly argue that contraception is murder [but see below!]. Why then try to deprive everyone, including non-Catholics, of its ready availability? If we can have insurance coverage for Viagra we can certainly have it for contraception, and no significant religious body has yet voiced any conscientious objection to the former. Yet the Catholic Bishops have also expressed support for a bill co-sponsored by thirty-six Republicans and one Democrat exempting all insurance providers - not only those with religious affiliations - from any obligation to cover any service, including contraception, to which that provider has a religious objection.

This stance by the Catholic Bishops is both hypocritical and immoral. Jesus said nothing about contraception - but he did call upon us to care for the poor. For many poor women, the expense of contraception lies beyond their reach. The Catholic Church seeks to deprive these women of means to limit births of children whose care they cannot afford. Yet it condemns them if they resort to abortion. Will the Catholic Church donate the funds needed to care for these children, whose births they seek to ensure? Or does their compassion stop once the child is born?

So often we complacently read the words of Christ as if they did not apply to us, but only to other people living in other times. What did Jesus say about elaborate religious hierarchies, bestowing endless honors upon themselves and concerned more about their own power than about serving “the least of these”? It is all right there in the Gospels. - CG)

An Immodest Proposal

(Concerning the Propagation of Contraception)

C. Gourgey, Ph.D.

For Preventing Undue Loss of Life, Saving Lives and Preserving the Sanctity of Life, as well as Safeguarding the Sacred Values of our Precious Society.

It is today most melancholy to witness the degeneration in social values, specifically as regarding the depreciation of procreation and the devaluation of our most sacred commodity which is human life itself. Our society, which has become generous to a fault, encourages a permissiveness by which sexual contact between the sexes takes place willy-nilly, though often without the babies to show for it. Such babies are citizens too, for though they have not been born, the country in which they were not born is our great United States, which entitles them to the full franchise granted every American. And so we must champion their rights, for the sake of Country, for the sake of God, and for the sake of our sanity.

Homicide by any other name is still the wrongful termination of the most blessed entity which can exist, which is the life of the human being. That is why we put to death those who commit this heinous act: to teach our citizenry once and for all the sanctity of life and the horrors created by taking it. Yet our collective moral fabric has so unraveled that we excuse without regret thousands of modern assassins, young ladies who engage butchers for hire, hit men posing as doctors, to slaughter the innocent just as did King Herod when he sought to slay the newborn Jesus. And many there are, of course, who commit the violent act themselves. No difference can be discerned between these wanton murderous egotists and the contract killers of Murder Incorporated. It must therefore be proposed that every woman who indulges in the act of aborting her unborn child be placed on trial for Capital Murder and executed forthwith. This is the only possible just decree, and indeed the only logical one.

Even so, having established this praiseworthy and inevitable result, we must admit that our work is yet incomplete. For there exists another vast class of victims in addition to the conceived but unborn. These are the unconceived. A life unconceived and never brought to light is snuffed out as surely as the aborted person in its mother’s womb. And so we do not fight for the rights of the conceived but unborn only, but also the rights of the unconceived and unborn. What can it matter at which point the birth process is interrupted? The next Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein, the next Mahatma Gandhi or Derek Jeter, if his life were to be foiled by contraception, would be prevented from drawing breath as surely as if he were stabbed in the heart by the abortionist’s scalpel.

There could be no truth more simple: the wrongful prevention and termination of life is murder, and whether such prevention of life take place before or after conception is of no consequence; the result is exactly the same: the child remains unborn. And if contraceptors in fact be killers, they must so be treated. Those who fail to conceive this country’s next great leaders are murderers and traitors, and must be dealt with as such.

But there is a better way. We can douse the flames before they ignite. We can thwart the problem at its very root. We can prevent the prevention of conception. And indeed we must. We must declare outside and contrary to the law all forms not only of abortion but of contraception as well.

Therefore I propose the promulgation of regulations granting all businesses and health care facilities, and not only those which are religiously affiliated, the right to deny insurance coverage for contraception. In this we must follow the moral lead of the venerable U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, with their strong tradition of defending religious freedom and personal and social purity. All who possess a keen sense of history will be aware of Catholic Bishops’ centuries-old stand for religious freedom, most particularly their own. They now continue this honored habit of imposing their spiritual guidance on the wayward. And so officials of this revered Conference have publicly stated that not only Catholic churches, charities, and hospitals but any religiously inspired employers in any business whatsoever must have the God-given and inalienable right to deny insurance coverage for contraception to their employees, whatever the religious persuasion (or lack thereof) of the latter. That is the American Way, as guaranteed in our Constitution and in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which as we should know if indeed we do not, was intended to guarantee all religious institutions in this country immunity from government interference.

Now one may object that non-Catholic employees of non-religious organizations also have a right to freedom of religious expression. Who will protect their rights? Must they be forced to conceive when they wish no further children? But this construes the matter in reverse. Contraception is interference in the creation of human life. It is the prevention of the existence of the newborn as surely as is abortion. As such, like abortion, it is murder. This is why the most devout rightly object to contraception, why they should not be forced to support it, and why they must impose it on others. And this includes even entrepreneurs of secular business organizations, who should not be denied the right to impose their religious beliefs on others as long as it be for their own good, as well as the common weal. Nobody, no authority sacred or secular, has the right to force any employer in this most civilized country to sanction murder.

Now there are those who will especially object to depriving indigent women of the means for preventing conception, who will appeal to our most common sentiments by calling attention to the impoverished state of these poor women. These self-appointed advocates will attempt to obfuscate with facts and figures and other such apparatus so as to show that women who cannot afford birth control are over three times as likely as other women to become in the family way without intention. But such women should be praised for bringing into life greater numbers of God’s beloved creatures. They are to be envied, not pitied. Blessed are they, for they carry out God’s will, even though it be not their own will also.

The matter is now definitively settled. The unconceived, no less than the conceived, have a right to life. And our Constitution, together with Sacred Scripture, prohibit the interference with that right which is sacrosanct.

Now that we have established, beyond any capacity to doubt, the legitimate rights of the unconceived, we must take this argument to its logical and inevitable conclusion. As has been demonstrated, any failure to conceive is tantamount to murder – this is clear, for if it were not so there would be no need to prohibit contraception. And so there exists a moral imperative to prevent the prevention of conception, at all times and in all places, as befits our respect for the sanctity of human life. To that end, whenever the occasion arises of social contact between a male and a female, society should encourage that the two engage in sexual coupling, with no barriers or chemicals to interfere in the desired outcome. In this matter we should ensure that all who possibly could be conceived indeed are conceived. By such means will our society avoid the moral stain of those who demean and deprecate the value of human life.

It further stands to reason that such measures apply even in the cases of rape and incest. For the fruit of such unions are no less human lives with the full complement of rights pertaining thereto, than are the issue of other couplings considered more legitimate. Does the offspring of a son and his mother, or a girl and her father, deserve any less to draw breath than the product of a more traditional parentage? Why deprive them of the opportunity for conception, when their odd origins are no fault of their own? And it is certainly no fault of the child of the victim of rape that it exists in her womb, and no justification for its extinguishing. Likewise, it is no fault of the unconceived from a rape that did not occur that it failed to be born. Therefore even rape may be considered a laudable act, and even encouraged, if it result in the creation of a new human life, above which nothing can be valued nor can any higher priority be maintained.

Now one may object that we are encouraging unrestricted fornication, and will this not accrue to the detriment of society, since there may be those who will start enjoying it too much? But those who present this objection fail to comprehend human psychology. It has been well established that anything made obligatory ceases to be a source of pleasure. By making the sexual union mandatory in every possible instance in which it might occur, we will be sure to drain it of its amusement. In fact, the common populace may even come to loathe it, which is the surest way to keep it pure and sacred.

And so concludes this most Immodest Proposal, by which the rights of all will be protected, and human happiness guaranteed under the sight of God and of man.